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Frank Denton: The danger of thoughtless people with handy guns

When our bold, front-page headline said “Arrests rare as JIA gun rate up,” my astonishment was not so much about the lax prosecution of people trying to get through airport security with firearms.

It was that 30 people last year walked into the rigorous Jacksonville International Airport security checks actually carrying guns, either on their bodies or in their carry-on bags. Nationally, a source said, 50 people a week show up at airports packing heat.

It’s apparently accidental. “A lot of people in Florida have guns,” a Transportation Security Administration screener told us, “and they forget it’s in the bags.”

Forget? You can’t even carry a golf club or a cricket bat onto an airplane. You have to take off your shoes and belt, empty your pockets, send your stuff through the x-ray machine and subject yourself to high-tech body screening — and maybe a low-tech body pat-down — and you forget you’re carrying a lethal weapon that, with a slight squeeze or slip, can blast someone, or a number of someones, into oblivion?

What I took away was yet more evidence that some Americans’ comfort with guns has made the weapons so common, really ubiquitous, that they easily can forget they’re lying around, ready to be picked up at the wrong time or by the wrong person.

Let me note that I am not uncomfortable with guns. As a child, in summer camp in Texas and my grandparents’ farm in Oklahoma, I was taught riflery and gun safety. When I became thoroughly trained and disciplined about right and wrong ways to handle a gun, in the rural tradition, my mother gave me my first .22-caliber rifle as a Christmas gift — at age 12. I never forgot and left it lying around, loaded, or it would have been taken away.

But in the past 10 days, you read these stories in the Times-Union:

■ The same day of the JIA story, on the next page, we reported that a 2-year-old boy apparently shot and killed his 11-year-old sister while they played with a gun left lying around the kitchen.

■ The next day, a 15-year-old Waycross boy fatally shot his 10-year-old sister with a 12-gauge shotgun, apparently while he was unloading it so she could hold it. Their father, a convicted felon, was charged with illegal possession of the gun.

■ Two days after that, a 21-year-old former Jacksonville University football player died after accidentally shooting himself in the stomach with a handgun.

■ A 4-year-old walking with his mother was wounded by a stray bullet fired from about 250 yards away.

And then there were the squabbles that might have ended with a few bruises had not the ready availability of guns escalated emotions and reactions, as when Michael Dunn shot and killed Jordan Davis in an argument over loud music:

■ A domestic argument involving two men and two women in St. Augustine ended up with one of the men shot twice and in critical condition.

■ Three St. Johns deputies investigating a domestic-violence report confronted an angry 66-year-old man who, rather than answer questions, started to reach under his bed, where he kept two guns. The officers shot him to death.

■ Jacksonville police interrupted an argument between two brothers, one of whom held a gun. When he was ordered to drop it, the 65-year-old instead shot at police, who then shot and wounded him.

Note I haven’t even mentioned the daily crime reports in which crooks deliberately use guns.

Sometimes, the gun mentality just takes over. We reported that a 22-year-old robbing a Jacksonville convenience store panicked when the clerk remotely locked the door to keep him from escaping. He was carrying a gun so he shot her. She died. He’ll spend the rest of his life in prison.

Also last week, we published these facts from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry about the ubiquity of guns:

■ An estimated 50 million Americans own more than 200 million guns. One-third of homes have them, and most are kept loaded, unlocked and potentially accessible to children.

■ Guns are 43 times as likely to be used to kill a family member or acquaintance than a stranger. If a gun is stored at home, the risk of homicide increases threefold and the risk of suicide fivefold.

■ The firearms-related death rate for Americans under age 15 is almost 16 times higher than the rate in 25 other industrialized countries combined. One in 20 high school students say they have carried a gun in the past month.

The gun mentality can change culture. A record number of American babies are being named after guns — 955 named Colt in 2012, 666 named Remington and 118 named Ruger.

We don’t know if anyone was named Glock, but our sports page reported that the founder of that pistol company has sold enough guns that he can afford to pay $15 million for a horse.

Much more of gun manufacturers’ money went to support the National Rifle Association, and we reported that its lobbyist in Tallahassee is busy as always.

The same day that we reported the pistol-packing numbers at the airport, a story in Metro said the Legislature is seriously considering NRA-supported bills legalizing warning shots by people who feel threatened, preventing insurers from considering gun ownership in coverage decisions, allowing schools to authorize gun-toters and allowing unlicensed gun owners to carry their weapons during “emergencies.”

On our Opinion page that day, one of our more thoughtful readers wrote in opposition to legalizing warning shots, saying it “will only confuse people more. And a confused person with a gun is a really bad idea.”

There was some encouraging news last week.

Michael Bloomberg, the wealthy former mayor of New York City, announced he will spend $50 million this year to build a national movement to motivate voters to demand legislative action against gun violence. He said he hopes to overcome the political power of the NRA, which spends about $20 million a year influencing politics.